Product 1

ProbeDriver

for Renishaw Probes

ProbeDriver- General Information

Probing: Then and Now.

With the acceptance of quality control in the production environment and drive towards maximizing machine productivity, probing has been embraced as standard practice in the field of production and one-off manufacturing. The application of probes to the set up of CNC machine tools brings significant productivity improvement by reducing the downtime associated with manual set up of tools, fixtures and work pieces, including the fast accurate inspection of first-off components, and production sampling.

Previously to ProbeDriver, the inspection programs for performing these operations had to be generated by hand, just as CNC machines were once programmed by hand using G-code…. a very time consuming and inaccurate process. With the advent of CAD/CAM systems, part programming speed and accuracy has increased 1000 fold. Now the same can be said for the creation of inspection programs.

Product Description.

ProbeDriver is a unique series of software products designed to act as a CAD/CAM system for developing inspection programs for your Machine Tool Probe (MTP). The system is generally used by the CNC Programmer and QC departments to develop these programs. With no extensive training required and considerable attention being placed on ease of use, the system is a home-run for beginner through advanced probe users.

ProbeDriver has also been developed with the existing probe user in mind. The application recognizes the same inspection routines and modifiers that users are already accustomed to, both in CMM and MTP environments: Bore/Boss, Web/Pocket, Vector measuring, etc. The interfaces are modeled after industry standards to be familiar and self-explanatory. ProbeDriver supports all major CAD platforms and many native-to-native, 27 standard (including: SolidWorks, Solidedge, Gear Data, IGS, Parasolids and VDA) and 7 optional formats are present (including: Unigraphics, ProE, Catia V4, Catia V5, STEP and AutoDest Inventor). ProbeDriver is divided into two installations: Software that is loaded on your CNC machine control and that which is loaded onto your PC. Both are integral parts of the probing package and allow the user multiple options for programming.

As the inspection program is developed directly from the original part model, mathematical errors are almost non-existent. Using this method of program creation, we also rule out errors that can be created by inspecting to the part program or to Tracker output, not to mention the more obvious typos from manual data input.

Reporting comes in several options. The simplest, and most widely used report is generated automatically and sent from the CNC/MTP to the PC using your companies existing communications software. If more extensive reporting or SPC is desired, the inspection data can be exported directly to any number of industry standard reporting packages, such as Applied Stats, DataLyzer, or Valisys

From 2000 to September 2004, ProbeDriver has been available as a 3axis system and supports both prismatic and complex multi-axis measuring functions. ProbeDriver 3axis is the rock-solid foundation for all ProbeDriver applications and is the base version. To view all ProbeDriver 3axis functions, click here

New September 2004
For those users requiring 4 and 5axis functionality HTI introduces ProbeDriver 5axis, an industry first. Click here for information on 5axis.

3 Axis Probe Driver

5 Axis Probe Driver